In Which Superheroes Punch River Gods in the Face

Those of you who’ve been following my progress over the past few months may know that I’m back to doing freelance writing, which is another way of saying “I’m unemployed… except when I’m not.”

Looking for work is, of course, a full-time job for a writer. My days are spent Googling “narrative designer,” and typing up customized cover letters for submission along with my resume. Every now and then I’ll get a bite and they’ll ask me to do a writing test, which takes anywhere from one to seven days of work. Sometimes, I’m familiar with the game company, and have played all their games. Sometimes, I have to jump in with both feet and learn on the fly. While I like to think I can learn a new franchise in a very short amount of time, the reality of this renaissance of nerd-dom we live in is that there are too many properties to keep up with simultaneously.

For example, like many nerds, I played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. But if a job opportunity pops up at Wizards of the Coast, the interview questions will be more like “What are your opinions on how to improve the Eberron campaign setting, and where do you see it going in the next five years?” Then I’ll switch gears to mobile games, where the test will be about Stardew Valley or maybe an interactive romance novel like Choices, and the next day it’ll be back to a real-time strategy series, asking me to write in the voice of generals of the Napoleonic Wars.

I can do these things. The sticking point is, can I do them faster, cheaper, or with more panache than whoever else is applying? Can I Skype with the employer at 11:00 at night because they’re on Beijing time? Am I disabled or a veteran? Can I speak Korean?

So that’s my day-to-day now. In between job applications, I play games to try to keep current on them. At night, I polish short stories, because, like I said elsewhere in this blog, I’m trying to sell them to fund a sequel to Civil Blood. I’ve polished the I.T.-expert-to-the-superheroes story (“The Needs of the Client”) and submitted it. The next in line, “Give a Little, Get a Little,” is in the queue for critiques through my writing workshop. Progress is slow, but measurable.

And then… there’s the game I love the most. The one that’s back from the dead.

The thing that really was the cherry on top to the old MMO City of Heroes was the fact that you could write up a biography of your hero and other players would see it. It was totally optional, but if you wanted to say you’re a time-traveling hawk-man wielding Excalibur, teaming up with a sapient crash test dummy, you could do it. And after around four or five years into the game, they came up with the Mission Architect, where players could create their own adventures, and have other players run through them.

I actually never got super into the Mission Architect when the game was live, because it was a rabbit hole you could be inside forever. I was writing for Bioware, getting my kiddo through toilet training, and the other players were cranking out great content already. There was one arc where you battled the Phantom of the Opera in the sewers beneath the Paris opera house. Another had archvillains inspired by the major arcana of tarot cards. And of course there was the “Visit from the Fashion Police” adventure, where you fought the Fashion Victims gang, wearing the ugliest, most clashing clothes that the costume creator could possibly make.

 My contribution was a humorous single-episode mission called “Economic Recovery Through Fisticuffs,” in which you find the perpetrators of the 2008 financial crisis as they escape on a cargo liner bound for Antigua, and punch them in the face. The minions had names like “Short Seller” (they were 4′ tall), “Economic Shock Doctor” (electricity powers), and bikini-clad socialites called “Somebody Else’s Wife,” because, in the words of a CIA agent I once met, “who sells out their country and jets off to an island with their OWN wife?”

Now that I’m revisiting the game (it came back in 2019), I decided to put in some time designing a story arc. I figured it’d be good for my game design skills, though honestly, it’s unlikely an employer would ever see it. While a core group of fans love the game, the chance that a particular dev has sought out the new version, downloaded it, has an appropriate-level character, and would play all the way through the 5-mission arc is ridiculously low. But it’s a fun challenge, and I’m happy to share the story.

The arc is called “Dr. Aeon and the Wrath of Achilles.” I created it because there’s a ton of players who make Greek and Roman superheroes now, and there’s a lot of good costume and powerset combos for them. And, of course, as readers of Mythkillers know, I’ve got an obsession with the Trojan War. So I thought a little time travel could be fun.

The players are summoned by Mender Lazarus, one of the guardians of the time stream, who says the balance of power in the player’s timeline is, was, or will be upset. Dr. Aeon, the chrononaut mad scientist for City of Heroes‘ premier villains, Arachnos, has broken into Paragon City University. There, he kidnapped a classics professor, and went back in time to the Bronze Age, to interfere in the course of the Trojan War. Why is he siding with the Trojans and assailing the Greeks with his high-tech weaponry? Therein lies the mystery.

What follows is a lot of fighting, because hey, it’s an MMO. You beat up everything from Trojan soldiers and Amazon princesses to a river god and super-soldiers with mechanical spider legs coming off their back like Doctor Octopus’s tentacles. I’m not actually allowed to post video from COH to YouTube, because you’re not allowed to make ad revenue on the game for legal reasons. But I will post some relatively-spoiler-free screenshots.

This is the university hallway for the first mission:

Enemies in the basement:

The second adventure has you rescue Greek heroes from Arachnos in the plain of the Troad:

(Nothing like a good foot sweep to knock down a Trojan archer.)
(Menelaos, Great Ajax, and Odysseus, as well as our hero in white.)

And there’s more! I recreated Achilles’ rampage, with you as the star.

While I won’t reveal the end, I can show off the neatest part of the game, the character creator. There’s about six good power sets for the rank and file soldiers: single sword, single axe, single mace, archery, staff fighting with a two-handed spear, and double blades (either swords or axes). Only the single weapons can be used with a shield, or they can be left alone and paired with more supernatural powers, like flames, regeneration, or Achilles-style invulnerability. So while I can’t get a spear-and-shield combo, I can get a lot of others.

(Rank-and-file Trojan archers.)
(Memnon, son of the Dawn, king of Aethiopia)
(Hector, prince of Troy. The spear looks more like a naginata, but it’s the closest I could get.)
(Xanthos, a.k.a. the Scamander River God. The blue slime is water animated to drip.)
(Aphrodite, goddess of love, sex, and sea foam. The sparkles animate.)
(Penthesilea, princess of the Amazons, with double labrys axes.)
(Achilles, with his famous shield.)

If you’ve made it this far and actually have a City of Heroes (Homecoming) account, the arc is #31899. Just enter that into the search bar at the Architect Entertainment interface, and the arc should be playable.

Now I think I’ll get back to the prose writing, since I’m all burned out on Greeks for the moment. Take care, and let’s save the world this year!

In Which I Plug My Latest & Greatest

I’m happy to announce that my work with Seasun Comics has at last gone to press with Mythkillers, the urban fantasy comic I’ve been working on for the last year. Mythkillers is the story of a teenage demigoddess, her clay golem best friend, a snarky Zulu fairy and an immortal Greek warrior teaming up to stop a dark god from wrecking the afterlife in his bid for power.

We’ve had Mythkillers #1 printed for a while, but now all six issues are up on Amazon Kindle. Here’s the link.

Issues 1 and 2 are available through ComiXology, but as of this writing, they are still processing Issues 3-6.

“But wait,” you may say, “What’s going on with your other projects?”

(Narrator: No one says that.)

The Civil Blood universe is still kicking, and I’m still revising “Infection in Everything,” a short story involving Infinity and her jiujutsu teacher. And I’m still submitting “Stopping the Bleeding” (a post-Civil Blood story about a new character) and the original humorous piece “The 10:40 Appointment at the NYC Department of Superhero Registration.” To make a long story short, there are a whole lot of short story markets out there and they’re all closed to submissions for the immediate future.

Okay, not all. But seriously, it’s a thing.

That’s the latest. I’ll post more when I know more.

Stay cool.

In Which I Come Back from Faraway Lands

Those of you just joining me may look at my last blog post and say, “Egads! It’s been three months since the last update! Where has Chris been?” And the answer, of course, lies in the text of the last update — I’ve been doing my day job, which has, like most hazardous gases, expanded to fill the size of its container.

The good news is, the job is pretty cool. When we last left our intrepid hero, I was Kickstarting Mythkillers. In short, Mythkillers is an urban fantasy that is sort of like if you took the ancient bloody-minded gods from Sandman and gave them to the goofy motherf***ers writing Guardians of the Galaxy.

We were successfully funded on Kickstarter, hit two stretch goals, and have been busily making the comics ever since. Since my last post on this blog, I added somewhere around 37 articles on the Seasun Comics news page, which explains a part of my conspicuous absence. If you’re looking to check out Mythkillers, we’re currently using Indiegogo’s InDemand as our online store. I posted a general FAQ for people new to the comic here.

But like any good act of magic, the reasons for my disappearing act here comes in threes.

The second reason I’ve been absent is more related to an old, long-held vice. From 2005 to 2012 or so, I played a massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game called City of Heroes. The game shut down in 2012… officially. In May or so, it was revealed that a secret cabal of reverse engineers had actually managed to illegally keep the game’s source code and played it on a private server for the last six or seven years. And then they reopened it for public play, free of charge, with the game company tacitly agreeing not to prosecute anyone for literally saving Paragon City.

It is difficult for me to express how much I loved City of Heroes… okay, it’s not difficult, but most of you wouldn’t understand me if I said “I got the Isolator badge the hard way in Recluse’s Victory and Disruptor on my empathy defender.” I’ve toned my fanaticism down a bit this time around, but I can now play it with my son, who enjoys creating characters just as much or more than he actually likes playing the game. So the game is a factor as well — it sucks up time I would have spent writing.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t stuck with my plan to write short stories and sell them to try and finance a Civil Blood sequel. Far from it, in fact. The third thing I’ve been doing in the evenings rather than post updates to the blog is the actual writing of short stories. I finished two recently and sent them off to a writer’s workshop.

The first, “The 10:40 Appointment at the NYC Office of Superhero Registration,” humorously imagines what the superhero equivalent of the DMV is like. It highlights the down side of being a regenerating hero, which is that to register your superheroic abilities, you have to demonstrate them, i.e. get the mess beaten out of you by a big dude in power armor who doesn’t know what a safe word is.

The second story is from the Civil Blood universe and is, of course, much darker and more serious. It deals with Infinity returning to Los Angeles after the events of the novel and meeting up with Katie, the martial arts instructor who was like a mother to her. Infinity chooses to “come out” to Katie as a vampire, but she can’t go home again the way she’d like to. The story’s title, “Infection in Everything,” refers to the vampire virus VIHPS as well as a passage in Musashi’s famous martial arts manual The Book of Five Rings.

So hopefully, both these stories will see the light of day sometime. I suspect “The 10:40” will be an easier sell, since SF magazines perpetually say they’re starved for humorous content. I think it hits a good mix of slapstick and poignancy, and it’s high time someone wrote a story about the super-saturation point of comic book crime-fighters.

They do say, “write what you know,” right?

In Which I’ve Been Two-Timing My Novel

Chances are, if you’re following me on social media over the course of the last month, you’ve seen me become a human spam-bot. In April, I jumped in face-first to the hashtags #writingcommunity and #indieapril. I told everyone I could find (mostly fellow self-publishers) about my legal thriller/urban fantasy mashup, and followed a ton of writers who followed back. I had my best month of sales ever, though at the cost of eroding a hole in my iPhone where the copy/paste prompt comes up.

I swore that at the end of April I’d chill out and stop hustling, and I did… to a degree. I stopped hawking my book everywhere, and, unsurprisingly, sales plummeted back to their barely-moving-any level. If you don’t have advertising in the self-publishing world, you don’t have anything.

But the spam didn’t end there, because I can *finally* talk about my day job. While things have been slow on Pirates of the Caribbean: Sea of Glory, our small team took it upon themselves to see if we could start a line of comic books. We’ve been at it for about a year, contacting artists, writing scripts, turning those scripts into comics pages, and all that — and we’ve finally announced a Kickstarter to get our first 6-issue run done.

My project is called Mythkillers. I’ve written a ton of promo material for it, because we’re trying to have new content to read every weekday. It’s all over at the Seasun Comics page. We’re doing everything for it that I can’t afford to do for Civil Blood — swag, giveaways, introductions to the team, featured articles, and so forth. We’re in the blitz right now (the Kickstarter runs until June 25th) so I have homework every night.

Art reviews.

Press releases.

Finding fulfillment companies.

Social media posts.

So yes, I’m a human spam-bot on Twitter for this month, too. I wish there was another way, but just like with my indie novel, every connection counts. Every visitor to our site is a victory, every backer is to be thanked. As I say on the Kickstarter page, a fan community is built up through blood, sweat, and convention appearances.

(Okay, we haven’t done any of those yet, since we’ve been chained to our desks, but our producer is going to be handing out promotional materials at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.)

All that doesn’t leave much time for writing that isn’t on the clock, so my short stories are untouched and unfinished. Eery time I tweet in promotion of my novel, it feels like I’m breaking character. Obviously I had time to tweet, so how dare I do it for a personal project?

After June 25th, the Kickstarter will be over, which of course means the real work will begin — making the books and the swag to be sent out to the backers. And, no doubt, we’re going to need someone to write press releases and posts for those months, too.

How do I end this except with the obvious?

You can check out our Kickstarter here.